Re: AC Re: Kubla Cant Pfft
"Still fighting the Vietnam War?......" I didn't bring it up, but I'm quite willing to correct any misconceptions that have been spoonfed to you.
"..... Sucks to be you, but you lost....." Don't be silly, i'm not a Yank (or from an ANZAC country) or from South Vietnam so I am a neutral. From a purely military viewpoint, US forces can claim to have won every major engagement but their politicians lost the war. The British success in Malaysia (despite a number of classic military and political mistakes) shows that insurgencies of the day could be defeated.
".....The North Vietnamese won....." After the military failure of the 1968 Tet offensive the "unification through military victory" doctrine of North Vietnamese Communist Party Secretary Le Duan was accepted to be impossible as long as NV forces faced resolute US forces in numbers. As the NV Minister for Defence Vo Nguyen Giap had predicted it would. Giap had engineered the eviction of the French from their old colony of Indo-China. The Hanoi leadership was seriously depressed that their plan for a major invasion and co-ordinated uprising had failed - of the almost 100,000 NV regular troops committed, over 47,000 had been killed and not a single town in South Vietnam was under their control by the end of the Offensive. Even the unified Vietnamese post-war could not put a final figure on how many VC irregulars were killed during the Tet offensive, but what really worried Le Duan was that the only miltary success of Tet was the control the irregular VC gained in the countryside, and they listened to Giap not Le Duan.
The decision to launch a military invasion had allowed the US to concentrate their forces for the major engagement warfare they were best trained and equipped for. Battles like that at Hue showed the overwhelming superiority of US forces in such classic warfare. As Giap surmised, to defeat the South Vietnamese the NV had first to get the US to willingly abandon the South Vietnamese. But Giap had been party to the planning for Tet, which implies he planned for the failure of Tet to undermine Le Duan.
What Giap (or his Soviet Russian backers ) predicted was that American public opinion managed to turn a distinct US military victory into a political defeat. The Johnson administration simply could not convince the American public that Tet was a defeat for the Communist forces, leading to the resignation of Sec of Defence McNamara. At this point, General Westmoreland asked for increased US forces and the invasion of Laos. From a military point of view, Westmoreland was convinced that an US force could "occupy and pacify" not just Laos but Cambodia and North Vietnam, especially as the best NV regular forces and the majority of their armour had been destroyed during the Tet Offensive. From a military viewpoint, Westmoreland was correct in that a full US involvement could have defeated the military forces opposing, but to do so risked WW3. Russia had always seen Giap as their man and Le Duan as China's, and worked with Giap to change the NV strategy to one of prolonged guerrilla warfare backed up by a propaganda campaign in the West. Giap won the war through the long grind of guerrilla warfare and flat-out lying at the peace conferences in Paris.
"......but the world didn't come to an end nor was Hawaii invaded by the communists....." The reverse side of that is that China realised they were not just facing the US in Asia but also the machinations of Soviet Russia. The eventual deterioration of the relationship between China and the USSR led to the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and several mini border wars between China and the USSR. Eventually, the domino effect that we are now seeing is that of the trade between industrial nations and the gradual Westernisation and commercialisation of both Vietnam and China. I bet even Giap never foresaw a day when McDonalds, KFC or Starbucks would be in Ho Chi Minh City and Beijing (http://investvine.com/starbucks-goes-vietnam-mcdonalds-to-follow/). In a way you could say that America lost the war but eventually are winning the peace.
".....The whole war was based on lies and the US has never fully recovered." LOL! Both sides lied, you numpty! Whilst the Communists could claim they were never given the free and fair election they were promised after the removal of the French, they had no intention of ever letting any such election be fair and no further elections after they had got into power. When the North Vietnamese eventually invaded after the US withdrawal it was in direct breach of the terms of the peace agreement they signed in Paris. In 1968 Le Duan and his clique deliberately tried to limit Giap's influence by sending VC irregulars (who lionised Giap) on impossible attacks against US military targets, all part of the Communist infighting for the future control of the unified country. Giap himself, despite the standard Communist blather about "the people", callously sent his forces into engagements he knew they could not win, but which he knew would produce the US casualties to be used for propaganda by the peace movement (even Giap admits losing 500,000 Vietnamese in his attacks up to 1969, a figure that underlines how ready he was to sacrifice his own compared to the US's desire to avoid losing soldiers). And did the Vietnamese get the "workers' paradise" they were promised? ROFLMAO!
All of which has very little to do with the UNHRC's attempts to "outlaw" drone developments.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
